Trump’s 1st Inaugural Speech Was “Some Weird S**t” Just Wait

Trump unconsciously tapped into the currents of repressed rage that flow just beneath the surface of our culture. He cracked the ice and that rage geysered upwards and continues to geyser upwards.  It is no secret that Trump’s supporters have taken his election as a cultural carte blanche to misbehave in any manner which they see fit. Just the other day, Texas Congressman and Democrat Filemon Vela reported that a group of migrant children which he brought to Washington, D.C. for the inauguration were disparaged by Trump voters who called them, “beaners,” “burritos,” and even spit on them.

Trump is the pied piper for these people. His gauche vulgarity and excess may mesmerize the normal minded and cause us to ask, jaw droppingly, what is wrong with these people?  What is wrong? They’re enraged and they’re totally lost, that’s what’s wrong. And what is really wrong is that they are totally alienated from their government.  They feel that their government is a thing apart from themselves, that their government doesn’t care, and that they cannot affect their government.  Donald Trump is the first person to come along in their entire lives making any kind of sense to them, with his 200 word vocabulary, articulating their rage. Just like the Howard Beale character in the movie, “Network.” Trump is the, “messianic jedemiah, articulating the rage of the common man,” as the Faye Dunaway character put it.  It’s as simple, and as terrifying in its import, as that.

When I was in college I read a treatise which said that all of modern society’s ills are traceable to one cause alone and that is that technological advances, starting with the industrial revolution, have all happened much faster than the ability of society to adjust. So technology and society have gotten progressively out of step since 1850. Since the rise of the computer as a tool of premiere importance in our society, vast numbers of people have become disenchanted and disenfranchised.

The advance of the computer is the single most important factor in the societal malaise that our culture is now telling us, darkly, is reality by electing Trump. The computer has taken away the “forgotten man’s” traditional livelihood and his self esteem — or so the legend goes. Televangelist Franklin Graham was quoted a few weeks ago, saying, however absurdly, that there, “was no pride in computer programming, and that the ‘men’ wanted the same jobs as their fathers and grandfathers,” i.e. coal mining jobs; a thankless hazardous pursuit which apparently Franklin Graham sees as quite dignified.  Dying at age 40 from black lung disease is perhaps dignified in Graham’s worldview as well, who knows?

In all events, these same men were lied to by Trump, who promised the coal mining jobs back, and the coal miners couldn’t be bothered with looking at the true facts of their position, because Trump voters don’t deal in facts. Anybody who was looking for facts during the 2016 campaign found them and ended up voting the Democratic ticket. The Trump voters didn’t bother with the facts, which would have told them, again, back to the coal miners, that their jobs were not gone due to an evil government outsourcing them overseas, but that attrition had taken their jobs in a complex global economy where natural gas and solar power are much cheaper alternatives than coal and the coal mining jobs were never coming back, no matter who is in the White House.  The current status of the coal mining industry in the world is that robot labor will be doing that task to the extent that it is done at all.

The Hillary campaign never grasped the numbers of voters that were enraged and lost. Hillary herself never saw this at all. She relied upon textbook debating techniques and campaign strategies like she who can raise the most money wins. She was totally out of touch with the real zeitgeist of America and that is why she lost.  Hillary was upbeat and positive and seeing the glass as half full not half empty.  No. The glass is broken and in shards, in the view of John and Jane Q. Public. Now the facts may indeed indicate otherwise.  Yes, we may have in fact had a drop in crime in the past eight years and in fact had a substantial increase in jobs and rise in employment in America, and in fact the ACA is the best thing to happen in this country since sliced bread. But facts are not feelings and people vote for candidates based on emotional buttons which either get pushed or don’t get pushed and in this case, Donald Trump managed to push the buttons, bigly. The Trump voters are a bunch of lobotomized Luke Skywalkers, muddling through life, “trusting their feelings,” doing what their fee fees say to do and they don’t know about facts.  But they still get to vote and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in and that’s why this horrible man was sworn in at noon today.

Whether Trump is legitimately president or not he is legitimately terrifying.  Today a milestone in American culture was reached; in essence, the nadir of democracy, and the pit of American politics, one hopes.  H.L. Mencken most presciently predicted this day when he said, “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”  Yes, just plain folks won the 2016 election, indisputably, and a great man left the White House today and a greatly inferior man entered it.  We can only wait for the next shoe to drop. Now is truly the winter of our discontent.

*****

That was in 2017 friends. I will be writing another one in a few days and my gut instinct tells me that it’s going to be the American Carnage speech on steroids, with all the billionaire buddies grinning down from the dais and winking, “Gotcha.” What America is will change on January 20. What the level of damage is that Trump will do, we’re going to find out and we can’t address each thing until it happens.

But never lose sight of this fact for a moment because this will keep you sane: Trump won by a narrow plurality. That anyone would vote for this man is a shocking commentary on who we are, but he got a narrow plurality, not the “landslide” he claims. He does not represent us all, he represents less than half of us. And the other half of us is livid, and we’re going to stand and fight. We will not be run over.

And Trump has only a sliver of GOP votes in both chambers of Congress. Bear these facts in mind as we go forward to redo where we’ve been before but also to deal with new problems and outrages unforeseen.